Rumble Fish

Steve Hays is Rusty-James’s best friend in junior high. Unlike Rusty-James, the 14-year-old Steve has no reputation to protect and is a social misfit who looks 12 and acts 40; he has a tender, blond, rabbit-like appearance, although when Rusty-James meets him many years later, he has grown a trendy moustache in line with mid-70s fashion. While Rusty-James is attached to making his reputation on the streets, Steve thinks that they live in “a crummy neighborhood” that he wants to escape through hard work (11). As Steve does not want to tread on Rusty-James’s territory, Rusty-James is able to enjoy an uncompetitive dynamic with him where he can be his honest self. Rusty-James, for his part, helps ensure Steve has formative adolescent experiences like getting together with a girl.

Although Steve’s academic prowess makes him unpopular with his peers, it earns him the respect of teachers, who encourage him to orient his efforts towards the future. Steve ultimately abandons Rusty-James because the scrapes his friend gets them into threaten Steve’s future. By the end of the novel, Steve has moved out of the neighborhood he despises and is set on acquiring a middle-class existence; he feels that he has achieved the American Dream. Steve therefore wants to look back nostalgically on the “good old days” with Rusty-James (6); he has acquired a position of safety that allows him to distance himself from their misadventures. 

Rusty-James’s idolized elder brother, the Motorcycle Boy, is “like somebody out of a book […] to look like that, and be good at everything” (72). The fact that we never learn his real name enhances his mythic aura. The Motorcycle Boy has a fearsome reputation in the neighborhood both for being the head of the former Packers gang, and for being responsible for ending the era of gang violence. Ironically, while Rusty-James wants the era of gangs to return, the Motorcycle Boy does not; in fact, most of the violent acts he commits during the novel are intended to rescue his younger brother.

The Motorcycle Boy, who has the “ability to do anything and find[s] nothing he wants to do” (82), is deeply dissatisfied and searching for meaning in his life. Arguably, the search for meaning is why he visited his mother in California. However, California did not have answers for him or do anything to lessen his feelings of isolation. Those around him contribute to his sensation of aloneness by either setting him on a pedestal or pronouncing him a bad and dangerous influence; both reputations prevent true interpersonal connection. Indeed, the Motorcycle Boy feels so separate from other people and their ways of thinking that he classes himself as “insane” (66). He only feels less alone during his encounter with the Siamese fighter fish, and then only because he relates to their propensity to attack their mirror image. His act of breaking into the pet shop with the intention of putting the fish in the river is a plea for liberation from both the neighborhood and his own troubled self. In doing so, however, he also consciously sets the trap for his own arrest and death, as he plays into the hands of the authorities who wish to destroy him. 

Rusty-James and the Motorcycle Boy’s father went to law-school and followed a traditional middle-class path until he married a rebellious woman who caused him to doubt everything he knew. When this woman left him after bearing his two children, Rusty-James’s father gave up on trying to have a job and provide for his family, instead relying upon welfare checks for his income. He is now an alcoholic who spends both days and nights at the bar, returning home only to change his shirt. He watches his sons on a destructive path and offers commentary from his position of seniority, although he does nothing to intervene. For example, when Rusty-James returns wounded from a knife fight, his father dryly remarks: “Really? […] What strange lives you two lead” (37).

For Rusty-James, whom his father calls Russell-James, his father belongs to a different world. He looks entirely unlike Rusty-James and the Motorcycle Boy, being “a middle-sized, middle-aged guy, kind of blond and balding on top” and “the kind of person nobody ever noticed” (37). The father’s nondescript appearance supports Hinton’s positioning of him as the quintessential background figure who is all but invisible in his sons’ lives. His formal diction, which is full of long, complex words and circumlocutory phrases, causes Rusty-James to think that he “talk[s] funny” (37), as though he is speaking a different language. Along with his propensity to read books, this is a key factor in Rusty-James’s alienation from him. The feeling appears to be mutual, as Rusty-James's father looks at his son “like he [is] seeing somebody else’s kid, not seeing anybody that ha[s] anything to do with him” (83). The father-son estrangement underscores that the boys are making their own legacy separate from tradition. Both sons refer to their father as “the old man” (23), which, in addition to being a common colloquialism, indicates that they view their father and his generation’s ways as redundant and irrelevant (23).

Rusty-James’s mother is a ruthlessly independent woman whose abandonment of her family traumatized her youngest son. She has fanciful, artistic aspirations, living in California and intending to move in with an artist who lives in a mountainside tree house. While we never meet Rusty-James's mother, her absence casts a notable shadow. Firstly, it contributes to Rusty-James’s fear of being alone, and to the Motorcycle Boy’s lack of comprehension about who he is. The Motorcycle Boy, whom his father often likens to his mother, shares many traits with her, including a dry sense of humor and an unusual view of the world. However, while he describes his time in California with his mother as “very funny” (56), the meeting does not solve his problems. It is also a source of pain for Rusty-James that while his mother seeks to make contact with the Motorcycle Boy, she does not appear to ask about him. Her absence contributes to the father’s disengagement and underscores Rusty-James’s orphan-like, self-authoring status. 

Rusty-James’s girlfriend Patty is a minor character whose presence illustrates patriarchal gang culture’s attitude towards women. Rusty-James, for example, objectifies Patty as a “pretty little thing” with hair dyed the blond color he most prefers (15).

However, Patty, who “[can] quit crying the easiest of any girl [Rusty-James] [knows]” and physically assaults a girl who was flirting with him (15), is as strategic and territorial as any male gang member. Despite her mother’s sending her to Catholic school to keep her away from boys, she has managed to have a boyfriend since she was nine. While she acquiesces to Rusty-James’s demands for a time, meeting him at home rather than at Benny’s so other boys can’t flirt with her, she breaks up with him when a rumor that he has been with other girls reaches her. She also turns up at Benny’s with Smokey, thus overturning Rusty-James’s notions that he is top dog and that he has control of her. Still, Rusty-James senses that it is a bitter victory for her, believing that she still loves him as much as he loves her. Like many of the boys in the neighborhood, Patty therefore sacrifices her happiness in order to earn status. 

Smokey Bennet starts off as a member of Rusty-James’s make-shift gang, but there is a “funny kind of tension” between the two because Smokey wants to be leader (16). The fact that Rusty-James senses that Smokey has only befriended him until he has the means to take over makes it harder for them to have a true connection. However, while Rusty-James imagines that Smokey will eventually challenge him to a physical fight, Smokey’s means are more subtle. When he successfully lays the trap that costs Rusty-James his girlfriend, he nevertheless claims that he will not fight Rusty-James. Arguably, Smokey wants to keep matters in the cerebral domain where he is stronger than his opponent. Although he mentions that if things were different, he would be the president, he also shows no real desire to start fights.  

Cassandra, a student teacher at the local high school, is one of many women who chase the Motorcycle Boy. Rusty-James cannot imagine what the Motorcycle Boy sees in Cassandra, who in his view “[isn’t] even pretty” and walks “around barefoot like a hick and [doesn’t] wear any makeup” (35). The fact that Cassandra moves out of her parents’ nice house to live in an old apartment in their less illustrious neighborhood also earns Rusty-James’s hostility. He resents Cassandra for experiencing such comfort and choosing to turn her back on it, and he prefers to view her as a caricature of a hippie. In leaving comfort for adventure and experimentation, Cassandra also resembles the mother who abandoned Rusty-James.

However, when Cassandra makes an appearance at Rusty-James’s junior high school as a substitute teacher, she shows resilience and even gives him some advice: “[L]ife does go on, if you’ll let it” (77). This is her way of hinting that Rusty-James should give up trying to follow the Motorcycle Boy and allow life to go on. Rusty-James refuses to contemplate her message, calling her crazy. This reflects the symbolic significance of her name, which she shares with a Trojan princess; in the classic Greek text The Iliad, Cassandra is cursed to speak the truth and have no one believe her. Just as the Trojans’ actions led to their city’s downfall, Rusty-James’s dismissal of Cassandra’s message leads to disaster.